Reefing the garboard seam, or, "rank amateurs with sharp objects"

So Paul brought back all the old friends—the 3 sanders, the sandpaper, the scrapers . . . and two new visitors, called reefing irons.  Now you may think, friends, that I would instinctively know what to do with these things, but I assure you I did not. 

 




Here are my three new buddies. As you can see, it’s nothing but the most modern of equipment for me! On the left is my grandfather’s scraper, then what I call “the hoof pick," then what’s cleverly called the “reef hook.”  It has many interesting edges, and darned if all of them don't have a purpose—and I used ‘em all.

This is Jeff’s keel . . . looking okay from far away, but up close was another story.

At the end of the day, however, I had progressed from novice to acolyte, if only by virtue of being able to do the limbo under the axles of the trailer to twist my body into the right angle to whack the iron with the hammer and push the rubber caulk out of the seam.

Tapping away was rather satisfying, only Paul has implied that I have to get a flashlight and look to see if any more caulk is left there.  Then you have to scrape some more, which I did with what I began calling “the hoof pick,” because I cannot find what this particular one is called.   

 

And the internet is no help—do you know there is not one video about reefing?  Noooooo, only filling the nice, perfect seams with nice, perfect caulk.

I have no idea if I did this right.  I will have to wait for Inspection.

 “Don’t touch the cotton or the oakum,” Paul warned.  Two problems.  First, what the $#@! is oakum? It sounds like a nice warm breakfast beverage but it is not, oh no, it is in this case a mass of wet, stringy greenish-brown goo resembling what’s in the bottom of a hash pipe—not that I would know.

Second, the oakum at times was so close to the surface that chipping out the caulk means yanking out the oakum.  What to do?  Stuff it back in the hole? I know that cotton (which was also up there in spades) needs to be rolled, and then twisted just so, and pushed up with a talent reserved for only the virtuosos of the maritime repair world. But I confess, I just stuffed it back up there. However, I still don’t know how we are going to caulk this seam if oakum is level with the wood.  There’s just so much stuffing of that crap you can do after 50 years.

Did you know that a lot of prison labor in Victorian times included the making of oakum, or the separating of the strands of rope to create it?  Doesn’t seem so bad of a job—beats working on a chain gang—but I guess it was pretty nasty. Contemporary oakum is made from hemp or jute and usually has some type of tar on it.  But if my oakum had tar on it at one point, it has long since abandoned ship.

Anyway, this is what it looked like coming out of the seam of Jeff Brown.

 

What not to do: oakum wants to escape, but you must not let it.

Here’s a bit of what the crevices look like, post-reef.

I admit I did not do the greatest of jobs on the bottom last year—it really needs a good scraping. Well, cadal, cadal as they say in Kosovo (a land not known for boating); little by little.

Just found a YouTube video of what may lie in store for me, and I think I will take to my bed with the vapors:

Commodores Boats caulking garboard seam with hawsing iron and beetle

Shipwrights Terry & Dwight working on the classic tug "Viking King" owned by Harken Towing. Location "Shelter Island Marina" in Richmond BC Canada.

Just kill me now.